The new all-electric Nissan Leaf. (Photo: Josh Cassidy)

This week, California officials are voting on the toughest new regulations in the country to promote cleaner cars. If passed, by 2025, 15% of new cars and trucks sold in the state would have to be powered by batteries, hydrogen fuel cells or other technology that produces little or no air pollution.

These kind of tough mandates have been tried before and they failed. But officials are confident that era of electric vehicle as finally arrived in California. That’s becoming the case in the Bay Area, which has been a strong market for advanced cars since the first Prius came out a decade ago.

“This is a Prius V,” says Joe Testa at Downtown Toyota in Oakland, showing one of several new Prius models that Toyota is releasing this year. “It’s the longer, wagon style, so it has a little more room.” Testa says there’s already a waiting list for the new Prius Plug-in, which comes out in March.

Toyota came out with hybrids ahead of other carmakers, maybe because the company anticipated changes in the market. Or, as some believe, it was due to a California state agency.

“We have been at the forefront of encouraging, and some would people would say forcing, new technologies. The Prius hybrid electric vehicle is an example of that,” says Tom Cackette. Chief Deputy Director of the California Air Resources Board.

California’s Clean Car History

Cackette says to see California’s legacy of shaping national car policy, you have to go back to 1975. The state had a growing smog problem, so the air board required cars to have catalytic converters. The federal government followed. California then tightened air pollution rules for cars. And tightened them again. “And almost in every case, the federal government would follow two, three, four, five years later.”

Today, new cars emit 99 percent less smog than cars did in the 1960s. “It’s probably the most successful environmental program in the world,” says Cackette.

Now, California has a new goal: dramatically cutting greenhouse gas emissions to fight climate change. Transportation accounts for 40% of the state’s emissions. “The number one strategy to reduce greenhouse gases is these car standards,” he says.

The proposed standards would cut greenhouse gas emissions from new cars in half by 2025. “We actually worked very closely under the federal government under the Obama Administration and we’ve jointly developed the standards. So they won’t just apply in California. But they’ll apply nationwide.”

Meeting these tougher standards will raise car prices by about $1900, but Cackette says those costs would be offset by fuel savings.

Jumpstarting Electric Car Sales

On top of that, California is taking an even bolder step, requiring automakers to sell increasing numbers of clean cars in the state. By 2025, they’d have to sell almost a million and half vehicles that run on electricity or hydrogen fuel cells.

The thing is – California has tried this before. And it didn’t work. “I guess I would call it a little too visionary perhaps,” says Cackette. In 1990, the Air Resources Board mandated that 10 percent of new car sales be “zero emission” cars by 2003.

“Obviously that didn’t happen. The price of gas was cheap in those times. The price of the technologies were high,” he says. The air board loosened the rules to include hybrid cars and cleaner gasoline engines, which he says drove carmakers to develop them faster.

Now, Cackette believes that technology has come of age. Nissan is selling the all-electric Leaf and Chevy is selling the Volt, a plug-in hybrid. And there’s another big difference.

Automakers Onboard

“The car manufacturers were adamantly opposed to the concept of government telling them they needed to build a new type of technology. That’s changed.”

“You are seeing more agreement between automakers and California and the federal government,” agrees Gloria Bergquist, a spokeswoman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers in Washington DC.

“Automakers have invested billions of dollars in these technologies. And so in some ways we have similar interests. Our interest in recouping our investment is now aligned with the societal imperative to get more of these vehicles on the road,” she says.

Bergquist says meeting the mandate calling for carmakers to sell a certain number of clean vehicles will ultimately depend on consumers. “There’s still a concern about what the consumer acceptance of these technologies is going to be and that can make a mandate very scary.”

Groups Push for Tougher Rules

“We think California could be bolder,” says Don Anair is with the Union of Concerned Scientists, a non-profit group that supports even stronger clean car rules.

“We need that technology to advance for the technology cost to come down and make these vehicles accessible to more and more consumers. By having a more aggressive standard, that gives more certainty to investors that California is committed.” Anair wants to see tougher standards sooner rather than later, since it takes 15 years on average for the entire fleet of cars on the road to turn over.

If the new rules are successful, electric cars could be adopted at a much faster pace. Tom Cackette of the Air Resources Board says they’re doing all they can to encourage consumers to buy them, including funding a popular rebate program and working with companies to build an electric car charging infrastructure.

“Right now, you’ve got to sort of have a jumpstart to this whole process and in the absence of a jumpstart, there’s a chance that it will fail,” he says.

A projection of how zero emissions vehicles like electric cars will be 87% of all cars on the road in California by 2025. Source: California Air Resources Board.

The 2011 Chevy Volt at the 2010 Plug-In Conference. Photo by Sheraz Sadiq

Originally reported for KQEDnews.org.

After years of stops and starts, electric cars and plug-in hybrids are on the cusp of a new era of mainstream acceptance, starting this year.

That was the message this week from automakers, government officials and utility operators at the Plug-In 2010 conference, a major international gathering of alternative vehicles at the San Jose Convention Center.

“Now the rubber hits the road”, said Craig Childers, an air resources engineer with the California Air Resources Board. “This is the last conference where we don’t have the cars. When we do this again next year, there’s going to be thousands of people driving these cars and it’s going to be great to see how that happens. We’ll learn from it and continue to evolve.”

A large amount of attention at the event went to two vehicles: the battery electric Nissan Leaf and the Chevy Volt, a plug-in hybrid. Both groundbreaking cars will begin appearing in showrooms in December.

At Tuesday’s conference, GM announced the Volt’s sticker price will be $41,000. A federal tax credit will bring the cost of the vehicle down by $7,500. The Volt also be available to lease for $350 a month for 36 months, assuming a down payment of $2,500.

GM calls the Volt an “extended-range electric vehicle,” which means that the car can go 40 miles on a single battery charge, using no gasoline. An additional 300 miles can be driven as the car uses gasoline to power an on-board generator to make more electricity and power the engine.

Tony Pasowatz, the Volt’s Vehicle Line Director, said that distance is key for getting consumers to overcome their “range anxiety” and trust that the Volt will get them where they need to go without being stranded with an empty battery.

“The Volt gives you an extended range capability that no other electric vehicle can provide you,” Pasowatz said. “So we have a good, solid confident proposition of 340 miles, whereas many electric cars will not achieve the range that they claim because their range is on a city cycle which no one drives, it doesn’t account for running the heating and air conditioning, and it doesn’t account for the degradation of the battery. And if you really only get 50 miles, the question is can that be your everyday car?”

The Nissan Leaf, an all-electric vehicle, which has a range of 100 miles on a single charge, will be made available to consumers by December in five states initially, including California.
To date, there have been 20,000 pre-orders for the Nissan Leaf, with more than 3,000 of those orders coming from prospective buyers in the Bay Area.

Mark Perry from Nissan standing next to the Leaf, an all electric-vehicle. Photo by Sheraz Sadiq

For Mark Perry, Director of Product Planning at Nissan, the consumer acceptance of the new generation of electric cars in the state resonates nation-wide. “If there was a barrier to adoption called affordability, that’s been knocked over. If there was a barrier to adoption called charging infrastructure, it’s been knocked over here in CA. There are no barriers now. The entire country is looking at California as a lead.”

The Leaf will cost $32,780, but after the federal tax credit of $7,500, and a California state rebate of $5,000 – which the Volt is not eligible for – the actual price will be $20,280. The Leaf also will be eligible for drivers to take into California’s carpool lanes without having more than one passenger, while the Volt will not.

Ginny and John Pauksta of San Jose paid $99 to reserve a Leaf. “The tipping point for me was the BP oil spill, the frustration of what we’re doing to the environment,” said John Pauksta. “It made me very angry. The fact that we’re fighting wars to protect our oil reserves just got to me. Electric cars were like toys, like glorified golf cars and now major car companies are coming out with electric cars that look like real cars.”

“You can fit five people in it and haul stuff around and the driving range is within a level of tolerance”, added Pauksta, who commutes 44 miles daily to his job in Palo Alto.

Instead of the lead acid and nickel-metal hydride batteries that powered the first generation of electric cars like GM’s EV1 in the 1990s, today’s electric car batteries are made of lithium-ion cells, which are now small enough that they can be easily assembled into battery packs and charged using a simple 120-volt outlet, as Pasowatz did with his Chevy Volt, charging it overnight at the conference center.

With the purchase of a Volt, consumers will get a 120-volt portable charge cord set and the option of GM’s 240-volt cord set, which would cut the charging of the vehicle in half, from eight hours to four hours.

Apart from the advancements in battery technology, a perfect storm of factors seems to brewing to usher in a new, more hospitable climate for electric cars, experts at the event, which runs through Thursday, said.

“The technology is moving ahead. The recognition of getting off of oil is important and I think the car is part of the larger energy environment ecosystem, it’s come to that realization that it is time to solve these problems in a systemic way”, said Pasowatz.

According to the Air Resources Board, there are roughly 20,000 pure electric vehicles in California, including roughly 15,000 small neighborhood electric vehicles that aren’t designed to drive on highways.

Utilities, regulatory agencies and environmental organizations expect those numbers to rise as long as gas prices continue to be high, which makes electricity as a fuel source a particularly attractive option.

“Gasoline is about $3, plus or minus, per gallon,” said Sunil Chhaya, a senior manager at the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto. ”Electricity is about 75 cents per gallon, so when you compare operating costs per mile, it’s about a fourth or a fifth the cost of gasoline.”

As the economy improves and worldwide demand for oil grows, gasoline prices may not stay at the current level.

“We’re not sure what gasoline prices are going to look like in the next five to 10 years and it’s widely expected that those will get on an upward trajectory again and start climbing up and beyond four a gallon,” said Childers. “In that case, we’re talking about a very big price difference for electricity. We actually need that because these electric cars are more expensive to build and buy and the only way consumers can afford it is by saving money on fuel."

Moreover, California’s grid, with its mix of hydroelectric power, nuclear power and renewables like solar and wind power, is also cleaner than the nation’s grid — which relies more heavily on power from coal-fired plants. So environmental benefits accrue when drivers plug-in to the grid to charge their vehicles. Chhaya said that “50 to 60 percent of the CO2 emissions can be reduced by using a battery electric vehicle plugged into the state’s grid.”

Still, a big factor for consumers is the sticker price of electric cars. Palo Alto-based Tesla motors offers currently only one electric vehicle line, its sporty Roadster that retails for more than $100,000.

Availability of public charging stations has also been a challenge.

Earlier this year, however, Campbell-based Coulomb Technologies received a $37 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to build 4,600 charging stations in nine metro areas, including San Francisco, San Jose, Sacramento and Los Angeles by September 2011. The charging stations will also feature a new connecting standard adopted in January by the Society of Automotive Engineers so that any electric car can be charged at the charging stations.

For consumers like Kadife Besir-Dunlap, a schoolteacher from Woodland, neither the Chevy Volt nor the Nissan Leaf can compare to her beloved EV1 which was reclaimed by GM in 2002 when her two-year lease expired and GM refused to renew the lease for her or other EV1 owners.

“The Volt is a plug-in, it’s not full electric,” she said. “The car of the future is powered by the fuels of Jurassic time. My frustration is renewed right now. GM could have produced another electric vehicle. They had the technology and a really nice car with the EV1 and they could have reproduced something like that, a more affordable full electric car. A hybrid car is not progress, it’s stagnation.”

Since the tow truck took away her family’s EV1, Besir-Dunlap has been driving an all-electric Toyota RAV4. Earlier this month, under a partnership with Tesla Motors, Toyota announced plans to start production up again on the all-electric RAV4 in 2012 at the NUMMI auto plant in Fremont.

Still, some people at the conference couldn’t wait to plug-in and drive.

“I see nothing but increases in gas prices so I want to get out of the polluting, expensive internal combustion world and into the less expensive, less polluting world of electric vehicles,” said Jared Alaqua, a 28 year-old Novato resident pursuing his M.B.A. “And I hear that they actually perform better.”

Check out these QUEST resources for related information:

Waiting for the Electric Car

Plug-in Hybrids

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Hydrogen is not exactly a fuel. That is, we don't burn it to make energy. It's used more as a medium for storing and transporting energy.

The science of hydrogen fuel cell systems is based on a simple concept. When you combine hydrogen with oxygen, energy is released. You get electricity. What makes it such a clean technology is that the byproducts of that chemical reaction are just heat and water.  So when a fuel cell takes hydrogen from a fuel tank and combines it with oxygen in the air, it produces electricity and emits only a wisp of heated water vapor from the tailpipe.

Hydrogen is combustible (remember the Hindenburg?), and needs to be handled carefully. However, there are easy ways to demonstrate electrolysis, which breaks water apart into oxygen and hydrogen, and the opposite process of joining those chemicals. In fact, you could make a type of fuel cell in your kitchen, with a popsicle stick, battery clips, Scotch tape and a few other household products. You do need one item that can't be found in your kitchen: platinum wire or platinum-coated nickel wire.

Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. And hydrogen fuel cell conversion is a squeaky clean technology. But the production of hydrogen for use in fuel cells — that can produce a lot of carbon dioxide. In fact, most hydrogen is currently made by stripping, or re-forming, natural gas. That's one of the ongoing criticisms of fuel-cell technology, that it generates greenhouse gas emissions just to get the hydrogen in the first place.

Fuel cells also can store energy generated by solar-powered electrolysis, as well as similar energy generated by wind and hydropower. That's the kind of hydrogen generation that advocates hope to eventually use in fuel cells. But being able to store energy also makes it extremely attractive to harnessing wind, solar and hydropower.

For example, California could generate a lot of wind energy at night, but since electricity has to be used right away, that nighttime, offpeak energy is less valuable. But if it could be stored in a fuel cell through the electrolysis process, that would make it much more lucrative.

Listen to the Where's my Hydrogen Highway? radio report online, and watch our Web Extra Slideshow.

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The House version comes from Democrats on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. If it passes, a consumer would get a $3,500 voucher for trading in a truck with 15 miles per gallon in exchange for buying a new truck that gets 16 miles per gallon – a one MPG difference. (If the new truck got 17 miles a gallon, the consumer would earn $4,500). That's why environmentalists complain that the legislation is more about stimulating car sales than it is about getting gas guzzlers off the road.

The Senate version proposed by U.S. Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), and Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), puts the bar a bit higher. In order to qualify for the $3,500 voucher, that same replacement truck would have to get 20 MPG – five miles per gallon more than the old truck. (An improvement of seven miles per gallon would earn the consumer a $4,500 voucher.)

Interestingly, this is a compromise even for Senator Feinstein herself. Check out her original, more stringent, Cash for Clunkers bill here. Proposed in January, it required stricter efficiency from the replacement vehicle, and would have allowed consumers to use their vouchers for used cars, or for public transit. Those conditions were junked, presumably, because they don't stimulate new car sales.

This article from the Christian Science Monitor, takes the number crunching even farther. Among the details worth considering is the "carbon cost" of making all these new vehicles that consumers will be enouraged to buy, should C4C pass: between 3.5 to 12.4 tons of CO2 per vehicle, according to a Duke economist.

Listen to the Cash for Clunkers radio report online.

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When those fumes combine with sunlight, along with other emissions, they form ground-level ozone, an air pollutant which acts as a greenhouse gas, contributing to global warming much like carbon dioxide does.

Take a look at this nifty, infra-red video footage from the California Air Resources Board, showing how fumes disperse from the gas pump when they aren't properly collected.

Ground-level ozone is also a real problem for human health, especially for people with asthma and respiratory disease. Just this week, UC Berkeley released a study finding that people living in areas with high ozone levels, like Los Angeles and the Central Valley, have a 25-30% greater risk of dying from respiratory disease than those in less ozone-heavy parts of the state, like San Francisco.

By the way, if you're wondering what "ground-level ozone" has to do with that ozone hole we used to hear so much about, here's the short answer: Turns out ozone does different things, depending on where you find it. In the atmosphere, ozone's a good thing. It forms a protective layer that shields the Earth from the sun's radiation – a layer that's been steadily eroded by chlorofluorocarbons, found in aerosol sprays and other places. Here at ground level, ozone's much less likable: a toxic air pollutant, as I said above.

If every station in California installs the new, hi-tech "enhanced vapor recovery system" they'll collectively cut back statewide, ground-level ozone emissions by ten tons a day – that's roughly equivalent to taking 450,000 cars off the road, according to CARB.

Listen to the Changes at the Pump radio report online.

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A carbon-tracking cell phone. Credit: Nokia

Not exactly the environmentally-conscious line of thinking that organizers were hoping for, but understandable for those high-schoolers holding a brand new, latest version of the Nokia in their hands.

The way the San Francisco pilot program works is like this: students get a mobile phone equipped with a GPS maps application. They fill out a profile with the make and model of the cars they use. The cell phone monitors movement, so it picks up when that student is making a car trip. The server factors in the time of day, the weather and humidity, and the type of car the student is riding in – and then calculates the amount of carbon output that trip represents.

The program currently doesn't differentiate between cars and other forms of transportation – bikes, ferries, trains, carpools, buses – so students may need to note when those trips were not regular car trips. The final number is their carbon rating.

When the program expands to three other San Francisco schools at the end of March 2009, a competition will be formed between the high schools to see which group of 25 students can cut back the most on their car trips and carbon output.

That will help answer the question of how much pollution people can save just by altering transportation behavior. And hopefully, the participants here are young enough that those transportation choices might continue after the program has ended. Once they get used to walking or biking, for instance, maybe they'll make that a regular form of transportation.

That, of course, doesn't ameliorate the answer to the other burning question – that, yes, the cool phone goes away when the pilot program ends.

Listen to the Tracking Carbon through Your Cell Phone radio report online.

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Research shows that to be healthy physically and psychologically, when we grow old we should stay connected to others. My father moved into an apartment that he had built next to my sister's house in Maryland. My mother and father-in-law are still able to live in their home in Orinda after more than 40 years there. My grandmother on my mother's side lived for nearly 100 years. She spent the last 20 or so years of her life in a community, where everyone had their own apartment, but everyone was responsible, according to their ability, to see to the safety and well being of the others. She rode with three other elderly women to daily Mass and shopping in a big blue Cadillac.

Recent research results published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives shows that the buildings we live in influence whether we stay connected– and stay healthy– or not. Researchers from the University of Miami, the University of Maine, and Lehigh University in the departments of medicine, education, human development, and architecture, studied a community of mostly elderly, Hispanic, and low-income people in a place called East Little Havana, a neighborhood in Miami. They gathered information about the health and lifestyles of more than 250 people over the course of two years, as well as the buildings they occupied.

Here is a summary of their findings:

1. People who live on blocks where there is a high percentage of porches, stoops, and with buildings built with windows overlooking sidewalks were healthier and happier than those on blocks with fewer of these architectural features. Interestingly, people in buildings with low windowsills out front (less than about a meter between the bottom of the window and the main level of the first floor) were more likely to feel isolated than those with higher windowsills. The researchers speculate that residents felt a lack of privacy with the low windows that made them feel vulnerable, and therefore less likely to interact with people outside the home.

2. People in East Little Havana who lived on blocks with a high level of first floor parking garages did worse physically and psychologically than those living on blocks with more buildings that had people, not cars, living on the first floors. Since newer buildings tend to have the first floor parking, it seems that buildings built before cars became widely available, say pre-1945, are more conducive to the health and well being of their elderly occupants.

The Cadillac my grandmother rode in? It was parked in a parking lot.

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The pilot project at UC Berkeley called Mobile Millennium uses cell phones as data points to show traffic patterns in real time.

To become an early adopter of the technology, you must have an unlimited data plan on a mobile phone with a GPS system. If you have that, you can sign up here.

Project leader Alex Bayen says that it's not just a breakthrough in how we can gauge traffic, but also a scientific breakthrough – that is, it was a challenge to take random data points, some in motion, some not, and to turn them into usable traffic information. This is how Alex Bayen put it.

And he adds that, as cell phones get more memory and more devices on them, they will become more central in our lives.

The science of place-based reporting is a burgeoning field. A program at UCLA, for example, uses cell phone information to create a personal environmental risk assessment and a UC Berkeley study monitors currents in the Sacramento River.

Listen to the Dialing in on Traffic radio report online.

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